Ship cases spark alarm in Australia
Evacuation of crew highlights risks, while Europe struggles against surge
SYDNEY — Australian officials were evacuating workers from a Kuwaiti-flagged livestock ship docked off the country’s west coast on Tuesday after at least half the 52 crew tested positive for COVID-19.
The cluster of cases is the fourth outbreak detected on board a ship arriving at a Western Australia port over the past month, in a state that has otherwise been free of the coronavirus for weeks.
“It is becoming clear that ships arriving with COVID-19 on board is one of the weakest links and the biggest risk to our way of life in Western Australia,” state Premier Mark McGowan told reporters in Perth.
The workers, from a number of countries, were taken from the Al Messilah ship directly into hotel quarantine, leaving just a skeleton staff on board the ship, officials said.
The ship, which belongs to Kuwaiti livestock exporter Al Mawashi, arrived in Perth last week, carrying a crew aged between 20 and 62.
In Europe, where concerns over a second wave of coronavirus infections are growing, French first lady Brigitte Macron is self-isolating for seven days after coming into contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19, the office of President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday.
“Brigitte Macron was in contact on Thursday, Oct 15, with a person who has been tested positive for COVID-19 this Monday, Oct 19, and showing symptoms of the disease,” it said in a statement.
France reported a massive increase in the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 on Monday, while also becoming the eighth country to report more than 900,000 cases since the start of the outbreak.
The daily data showed the partial curfew imposed on nine major cities, including Paris, since Saturday, has yet to yield some results.
Experts say it takes two weeks on average for containment measures to show their effectiveness. During the country’s national lockdown put in place between March 17 and May 11, hospitalizations kept rising until April 14.
Health authorities reported on Tuesday 13,243 new infections over the latest 24-hour period, sharply down from Saturday’s record of 32,427 and Sunday’s tally of 29,837.
UK researchers are preparing to begin a controversial experiment that will infect healthy volunteers with the coronavirus to study the disease in hopes of speeding up the development of a vaccine.
Challenge study
The approach, called a challenge study, is risky but proponents say it may produce results faster than standard research, which waits to see if volunteers who have been given an experimental treatment get sick.
Imperial College London said on Tuesday that the study, involving healthy volunteers between the ages
of 18 and 30, would be conducted in partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and hVivo, a company that has experience conducting testing.
Professor Peter Openshaw, co-investigator on the study, said: “Deliberately infecting volunteers with a known human pathogen is never undertaken lightly. However, such studies are enormously informative about a disease, even one so well studied as COVID-19.”
In the first phase, researchers will
aim to determine the smallest level of exposure needed to cause the disease. Researchers will then use the same challenge model to study how potential vaccines work in the body, the bodies’ immune response and potential treatments.
Globally, there were 40,411,186 confirmed coronavirus cases and 1,118,398 deaths as of Tuesday afternoon, according to a tally kept by the Johns Hopkins University in the United States.
Argentina became the fifth country to hit 1 million cases of COVID19 on Monday, after the United
States, India, Brazil and Russia, a tally by Johns Hopkins University said. It is only the second Latin American to have done so.
Argentina was under quarantine by a presidential decree from March 20 to Oct 11 to curb the spread of the pandemic, with only industrial and business activities permitted.
Argentina reported 12,982 new COVID-19 cases in the latest 24-hour period, taking the national count to 1,002,662, the health ministry said on Monday.